NetXen develops NICs to stimulate volume 10GbE deployment

NetXen Inc. has developed a family of multi-protocol, intelligent network interface controllers (NIC) that are aimed at facilitating widespread deployment of 10Gbit Ethernet (GbE) technology in datacentre networks.

The NX203x devices, which offload and accelerate processing tasks in networking equipment, are said to increase datacentre network performance by a factor of 10 and reduce power by 50 per cent compared with conventional devices that are twice the cost. The dual-port, 10GbE interface controllers are programmable and offer native PCIe support.

NetXen is offering three board-level products that incorporate its NX203x Intelligent NICs. The boards are layer 2 NICs that can support the offload of TCP/IP, iSCSI and RDMA protocols to improve throughput in servers, server appliances and storage platforms, while reducing host CPU utilisation.

The NXB-10GCX4 is based on the NX2031, a network controller that has two 10GbE interfaces and two GbE interfaces. The NXB-10GCX4 is a 10GbE, low profile PCI Express card with a native CX4 copper interface.

The NXB-4GCU Intelligent NIC is based on NetXen's NX2035, which has two 10GbE interfaces and four GbE interfaces. A combination of any four-port interfaces can be used simultaneously. The NXB-4GCU is a half size PCIe card with four GbE ports.

The NXB-10GXxR Intelligent NIC is based on NetXen's NX2031. The NXB-10GXxR is a 10GbE, low-profile PCIe card with pluggable XFP modules (SR or LR).